Product Reviews

With its superb handling of vectors, bitmaps, audio and video, Flash is the designer's choice for maximum-impact web publishing. But there's one medium it doesn't support - 3D. And that's where Electric Rain's Swift 3D comes in.

The secret of the program's success lies in its ability to take 3D objects and animations and output them as high-quality Flash movies, as well as in Illustrator AI/EPS and SVG formats. The key to this is the RAViX III rendering engine, unchanged in this release, which takes both the scene's geometry and lighting into account when recreating the scene as vector-based frames. It's a balancing act between output quality and file size but, with fill options varying from a single averaged colour per object, through to linear gradients for every polygon, all bases are covered. And with advanced features such as support for shadows, reflections, transparency and highlights, plus the ability to export these as separate layers for import into Flash itself, Swift 3D's results and workflow integration are excellent.

Swift 3D's output capabilities aren't in doubt, but first you need a 3D model or animation to output. Originally, the program's aspirations here were basic, providing everything needed to create a spinning logo, but little more. Over time though, Electric Rain has gradually enhanced Swift 3D's capabilities with features such as extrusion and lathe-based modelling, support for advanced materials, camera-based animation and bitmap-based rendering. Now, with version 4, Electric Rain is looking to turn Swift 3D into a fully fledged 3D modelling application.

However, it still recognises that its users aren't 3D modelling experts, and don't want to be, so it's sensibly enhanced the range of drag-and-drop presets available from Swift 3D's Gallery. New categories have been added, containing a few high-quality models, common 2D shapes for extruding and lathing, and the five most common bevel types. You can also save your own models, shapes, animations, materials and lights directly to the Gallery for future use.

Building blocks like these are useful, but they're no replacement for direct hands-on modelling power - and it's in this area that Swift 3D 4 has seen the most improvement. The existing Extrusion Editor and Lathe Editor have both been given minor tweaks, but the biggest change is the addition of an entirely new editing tool: the Advanced Modeler. This presents an existing object, or a primitive such as a sphere or plane, as an editable polygonal

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mesh. Selected vertices, edges or faces can then be transformed using a combination of the interactive Move, Scale, Rotate and Extrude tools, along with a range of commands for aligning, mirroring, flattening, welding, subdividing and so on. Particularly powerful are the soft selection capability and the ability to smooth and round surfaces - both important for creating more organic and natural shapes.

As well as controlling the form of your objects, the Advanced Modeler allows you to define a surface group, setting whether lines should be rendered in that area or not. You can also apply separate materials and bitmaps to these groups, say to produce a cube with different coloured faces. And when applying bitmaps you can use the Move, Scale and Rotate tools to precisely control your texture mapping. Swift 3D 4's bitmap handling is better all round and now includes support for importing textured 3DS files, as well as textured display in the viewports. It's important to remember, though, that for most Flash output you'll end up converting these bitmap textures to vectors, so the final appearance will only be a very crude approximation.

With modelling and formatting taken care of, it's time to bring your scene to life. Again, Electric Rain has enhanced the presets available in Swift 3D 4's Gallery, providing a range of professionally designed lighting schemes and fly-by, deformation and path-based animations to drop onto your model. For more animation control, you can also now animate objects along a custom Bezier path and easily set a camera to follow the object.

All this new power is welcome, and Swift 3D 4 is a stronger program than version 3, but we're not convinced that the average user will actually take advantage of such advanced features. In fact, many will find the bundled version of Swift 3D Xpress perfectly adequate for everyday use. This offers all the rendering power of the RAViX III engine, along with basic extrusion and drag-and-drop based bevels, materials, lighting and even animations. It also works directly from the Macromedia Flash MX/2004 stage, returning the results as an embedded movie clip.

More frustratingly, those that invest their time and effort in trying to get to grips with Swift 3D's more advanced features will still keep hitting basic limitations, such as the difficulty of trying to arrange a scene involving more than a couple of objects. Ultimately, Swift 3D 4 demonstrates that trying to graft an advanced 3D modelling application onto a dedicated vector renderer is a much harder task than working the other way round. It's worth noting that Electric Rain produces its own RAViX-based rendering plug-ins for 3ds max and LightWave, as well as licensing the technology to other 3D developers, such as Eovia.

Having said that, the plug-in costs considerably more than Swift 3D 4 itself - plus the cost of the dedicated 3D app. So, with little competition in the budget 3D arena and bearing in mind the current bundling of Swift 3D Xpress (standalone price $99), there's no question that Swift 3D 4 represents great value for money.